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Oxbridge Rejection

hobnob

Well, yes, maybe they did go a bit overboard on the whole softening-the-blow thing. :wink:

I'd still say that's better than a rude "You just weren't good enough. Tough."-type of rejection, though.

i was good enough to get in but was kicked out after a year cos i failed my exams! that feeling is far worse than being rejected out right! :rolleyes:

Reply 141

sweet_fluffy_nuke

Dulac84

i was good enough to get in but was kicked out after a year cos i failed my exams!

Well, you did say that your strategy was to not study at all until a week before the exams. What did you expect ? :rolleyes:

Reply 142

Font

acolyte

Well, you did say that your strategy was to not study at all until a week before the exams. What did you expect ? :rolleyes:

i expected what i got - to be honest i am not too bothered...much happier now anyway - thats the main thing...i went through anxiety, hated my course, had no friends and even hating the accommodation! - hopefully a fresh start in london will do that trick :rolleyes:

to the neg repper on my original post - would people really die for a place at oxbridge? if so i think those people have no life....there is more to life than academia, and more to life than oxbridge :rolleyes:

- take a gap year - it'll hit you like a tonne of bricks :wink:

D

Reply 143

coldfish

12

Good god, what's the guy done wrong? He's allowed to fail exams, and he's -right- that there's more to life than which university you go to.

On a note which I think is related to the neg rep he got, I could leave Cambridge now with one year to go and I won't have done anything wrong. It's not my solemn duty as a succesful applicant to "make the most of it" or anything similar. It is my place, and I can do whatever the hell I want with it.

Reply 144

hobnob

14

acolyte

You will spend the rest of your life with the tag Oxbridge failure.

Of course - after all, it's a well-known fact that for the rest of your life people will continue to ask you which universities you applied to when you were 17, and then judge you by your reply. :rolleyes:

Reply 145

Consie

15

i think it all gets bigged up a bit too much at our age. So long as you go to a good university, in the scheme of things your free to get as high as you want work wise. Going to a terrible uni might put a limit on how high you get, but i think in the long run good uni's all yield the same results in terms of their influence on climbing work ladders or whatever.

in the short run/very short run having an Oxbridge degree might put you slightly ahead of everyone else, but i think it largely becomes neck and neck as you get older. Real work expierence in relevent industries becomes more important than what uni you went to when wanting to swtich jobs or whatever i think.

Reply 146

Fizzer

Yes, but how fast you climb that ladder does depend, to a certain extent, on where and what your degree was in.

Reply 147

73337

18

Dulac84

i expected what i got - to be honest i am not too bothered...much happier now anyway - thats the main thing...i went through anxiety, hated my course, had no friends and even hating the accommodation! - hopefully a fresh start in london will do that trick :rolleyes:

to the neg repper on my original post - would people really die for a place at oxbridge? if so i think those people have no life....there is more to life than academia, and more to life than oxbridge :rolleyes:

- take a gap year - it'll hit you like a tonne of bricks :wink:

D

Obviously. Death=no life

Reply 148

Consie

15

Yes, but how fast you climb that ladder does depend, to a certain extent, on where and what your degree was in.

I know, but if you go to a top uni you're sorted basically. If you go to John Moores it might be a different story.

Reply 149

shady lane

16

Molière

Yes, but how fast you climb that ladder does depend, to a certain extent, on where and what your degree was in.

Massive exaggeration. You can get a good job and then not get promoted because you're a crap employee, whether you went to Oxbridge or not.

Reply 150

Craghyrax

17

hobnob

Well, yes, maybe they did go a bit overboard on the whole softening-the-blow thing. :wink:

I'd still say that's better than a rude "You just weren't good enough. Tough."-type of rejection, though.

Wasn't that what it was, though? :confused:

That's how I read it, tbh.

Reply 151

Craghyrax

17

Dulac84

i was good enough to get in but was kicked out after a year cos i failed my exams! that feeling is far worse than being rejected out right! :rolleyes:

;console; Sucky! :s-smilie:

Reply 152

Craghyrax

17

acolyte

You will spend the rest of your life with the tag Oxbridge failure.

Was that necessary? :wtf?:

Reply 153

hobnob

14

Craghyrax

Wasn't that what it was, though? :confused:

That's how I read it, tbh.

Hmm, I thought x_muso_x was the one who got a slightly patronising "we are aware you will be devastated at receiving this, but please don't commit suicide just yet" type of letter and somebody else got the rude letter? :confused:

Reply 154

x_muso_x

3

hobnob

Hmm, I thought x_muso_x was the one who got a slightly patronising "we are aware you will be devastated at receiving this, but please don't commit suicide just yet" type of letter and somebody else got the rude letter? :confused:

yup

Reply 155

Craghyrax

17

hobnob

Hmm, I thought x_muso_x was the one who got a slightly patronising "we are aware you will be devastated at receiving this, but please don't commit suicide just yet" type of letter and somebody else got the rude letter? :confused:

Oh sorry. My mistake :redface:

I thought it was still about the one my friend got that essentially said she didn't have the intellectual capacity to study at Cam.

Reply 156

Angelil

19

At least some of you here got feedback!
I was rejected from Oxford (Magdalen) in December 2003 and we were told (by the school, possibly? Can't remember...) that Oxford would be sending feedback. The following term I asked for mine and my head of sixth form said Oxford weren't sending any this year because they had too many applicants to deal with sending out feedback. At the time I believed her but now I really think she was lying and that I should have telephoned to find out - even if it had been harsh it would have at least given me peace of mind.
I had 4 interviews - one was half on Shakespeare and just didn't make sense (you could read this as me being too stupid or them asking silly questions, but I can't really remember enough of it to even relate to you any of the questions I was asked), with the other half being a debate-style interview on the current state of the NHS (a topic about which I knew NOTHING despite reading newspapers at least once a week, and a topic which I found to be an unfair choice given that the girl before me got the topic of Iraq, which everyone has an opinion on!). The second interview was going over my language aptitude test (I actually did quite well - only 2 questions wrong I think) and asking how I would cope with peer pressure, which I think is a really silly question to ask anyone as most people are quite bad at judging themselves in that area. The only answer I could think of was that I'd been bullied enough during my years at school to know that you shouldn't take any notice of peer pressure :redface:

which may not have been the best answer...
My third interview was the only one that went really well and was just 10 minutes talking about books :smile:

My fourth interview was when they lock you in a room for an hour with a pack of poetry, which you have to annotate and choose poems to talk about in the following half hour. I was trundling along quite nicely until I mixed up the meanings of the words 'sanctimonious' and 'sanctified' :redface:

(a mistake I would never normally make, and to be honest I think that someone else in my sister's cohort this year in the same interview saying something was a sonnet when it wasn't is possibly worse...).
So all of that put together probably didn't look too good. Add the fact that I applied to probably the most competitive Oxford college, and add the fact that there were 3 of us going for 2 places (one was post-A Level and already had her grades; the other girl was from Germany so had the fact of being bilingual on her side as well as being generally clever), and you have one rejection (or so I suspect was the reasoning!). It's difficult to tell if I would have got in if I had been competing against different people or if I'd had a different debate topic and other such things.
Above all else I just wish they'd given me some feedback. Not that it matters that much now anyway *points to postgrad destination in sig*...

Reply 157

Craghyrax

17

All of us make complete no-brainers in interviews. I doubt they pay much attention to it, tbh. I had no feedback after being rejected for Natsci by Trinity Hall. As far as I understand it, the larger colleges do need a bit more pestering when it comes to sending feedback as they have so many people to deal with. (Not that T.Hall's large, I know)

Reply 158

Consie

15

My worst answer was probably an attempt to pull the wool over an interviewers eyes. He basically asked the difference between fascism and Nazism and I was like 'isn’t fascism so circumstance dependant that it can’t be defined?' and he was like 'no......I repeat, define the difference'

Reply 159

Craghyrax

17

^o) what did you try that for? :s-smilie:

Heh.. when I got stuck I just said 'I don't know' :dontknow:

Oxbridge Rejection

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